JEFF PRESTRIDGE: How a banker curdled my breakfast milk

The BBC Radio 4 Today programme has been part of my morning routine for the past 30 years. Yet my breakfast milk is invariably soured at Christmas time when ‘celebrities’ (and I use the term loosely) are invited to guest edit the programme.

Last week (on New Year’s Eve, of all days) I nearly jumped off my fourth-floor balcony in London’s Docklands in despair as I woke to hear that Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclays, was guest editing.

This is a bank that has committed a multitude of sins – everything from endemic payment protection insurance mis-selling through to the rigging of the London inter-banking rate, known as Libor.

Not a celebrity: Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins is a seriously rich banker who has made hay at the expense of his customers, says Jeff Prestridge

Although it was good to hear the media-savvy Jenkins admit that it would take up to a decade for the bank to repair the damage done to its reputation since the financial crisis, less savoury was his defence of bankers’ bonuses and the constant reference to the fact that the programme’s editor was the boss of Barclays.

Talk about free advertising. It’s not what I pay my TV licence for (give me the omnibus edition of the Archers any day).

If Barclays wants to advertise, it’s free to do so as it demonstrates via its £40million a year support of football’s overhyped Premier League. But it’s not right that taxpayers are straitjacketed into giving free publicity to a bank that over the past decade has done society so much harm.

Jenkins is not a celebrity. He is a seriously rich banker who has made hay at the expense of his customers.

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It's just over a year since the City’s regulator implemented its so called ‘retail distribution review’.

The objective of the exercise was to clean up the financial adviser industry by forcing practitioners to take exams and to charge fees rather than earn their income via commission payments from the investment houses and insurers whose products they sold.
Has the review been a success? I’m not so sure.

The number of independent financial advisers in business has fallen sharply while the onset of fees (heading towards £200 an hour) has deterred many people from seeking quality, face-to-face guidance.

Independent financial advice has become more exclusive – effectively available only to those with £100,000 and upwards to invest. That’s not what the review intended.

Probably the only good thing to come out of the shake-up is the death of the bank branch adviser. All of the major banks – including Barclays – have now withdrawn from providing such advice on the grounds that it is too expensive to deliver.

These ‘advisers’ have been responsible for some of the biggest mis-selling scandals to scar the financial services industry – think payment protection insurance, precipice bonds – so maybe the review has been a success after all.

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I have always baulked at using cash machines that charge me for the privilege of accessing my own money. In fact, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve used one.

So I’m four square behind Labour MP Frank Field, an adviser to the Government on poverty, and his call for an end to free-to-use cash machine ‘deserts’ – parts of the country where people cannot withdraw money from a machine without paying a fee of anything from 75p to £10.

Field is so agitated that he has warned the banks he will seek the Chancellor’s help if they don’t promise to phase out the charges or install more free-to-use machines.
Maybe it’s a problem Jenkins would like to tackle.

I am sure the BBC’s Today programme would give him the oxygen of publicity if he became Field’s white knight.

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Accountancy firm Deloitte says the demand for bricks-and-mortar banking services is waning. Instead banks are eagerly adopting new technology as evidenced by the growth in the use of contactless cards and e-wallets.

Barclays, it must be said, has led the way on contactless cards and mobile phone banking with Pingit. So my prediction for the year ahead is that Jenkins will shut more branches than any other rival.

I will gladly appear on the Today programme and apologise if I am proven wrong.